The Murder Room

by Michael Capuzzo

  Hall was left reading fragments of clothing, a zipper, and a Virginia Slims Menthol 100s cigarette pack found in the grave for the story they might tell.

  Hall was disappointed that the blue stamp on the cellophane pack had faded so badly the date sold could not be read, even in a forensics lab. But the manufacturing dates of the clothing—size ten or twelve Gitano jeans, size six Sergio Valente–brand underpants, and a small Cappacino-brand shirt—indicated the young woman was alive on June 15, 1986, and probably dead by April 1988. Those dates coincided with Shawcross’s reign of terror. Paroled from prison after serving only fifteen years for the admitted rape and murder of a ten-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl, Shawcross moved to Rochester and began killing in early 1988. He was arrested in January 1990, when police left his eleventh victim floating in a creek based on a psychological profile that suggested the killer would return to the scene. Shawcross was arrested masturbating as he sat in his car on a bridge over the creek. He confessed in custody, and his eleven victims were all identified. Maybe this was a twelfth?

  The detective was deeply frustrated. He hadn’t ruled Updegrove out, but he’d been unable to build a case against him or anyone else. He’d interviewed thirty-nine people who lived in the area around the crime scene during the suspected period of the crime and had since moved away. Nearly nine months after the grave was discovered, he led a team of police officers, state troopers with cadaver-detection dogs, and a state wildlife expert to search for other graves and for animal dens that might contain bones or artifacts taken from the grave. Nothing was adding up. He asked for help from the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit in Quantico, Virginia, but the FBI “felt there was insufficient data for case profiling,” Hall said. The Vidocq Society was his last hope.

  Following the presentation, after Fleisher had given the Manlius police the ceremonial magnifying glass, “symbolizing the first scientific tool of detection,” Walter approached Detective Hall. “The fact of the matter is,” he said, “despite what our friends at the bureau say, a profile might be possible in this case. More than one may think is revealed by fragments of bone in a grave.”

  Killing a prostitute and dumping her body in the woods was a “classically efficient, practical, cold” crime that bore “the marks of a power-assertive killer,” he said. Walter said he’d already formed “bits and pieces” of a psychological profile.

  Of the dozen suspects the Manlius police had considered, he said, “only Updegrove fits the profile.” Walter invited the Manlius officers to visit the Biddle House, his home in Montrose, Pennsylvania, to discuss it further.

  “I believe,” he added, “that we’re looking at a serial killer.”

  “I don’t think Updegrove did it,” Bender blurted out from the circle of cops, his face reddening. The artist had been busy researching the crime, his first step of the process of reconstructing the bone fragments into a skull and face. But it was a gut feeling, rather than any particular research that told him Updegrove was innocent.

  Walter rolled his eyes. “Frank, I appreciate your thoughts, OK, but you’d best stick to your day job. Don’t let your emotions carry you beyond your pay grade.” Walter admired his partner’s extraordinary forensic art and intuitions, but did not appreciate it when those intuitions crossed onto his turf of psychological profiling of killers.

  “Richard, you’re good,” Bender shot back. “But you’re not always right.”

  “My dear boy, your thinking has no structure, no foundation,” came the arch accent. “You pick up your primary ideas from TV shows. You’re like a fart in a bathtub.”

  VSMs on the edge of the conversation tittered. A decade after their most famous case, the capture of mass murderer John List, Bender and Walter had become even more nationally prominent in their fields. They had collaborated successfully on Vidocq Society cases, and seemed closer-than-ever drinking buddies and brothers-in-arms. But their teamwork resembled the work of an anvil and hammer; the more productive they became, the more sparks flew.

  Bender had taken to telling anyone who would listen that it was he, not Walter, who had the idea to put thick tortoiseshell eyeglasses on John List’s face—a key detail that helped lead to the swift identification and arrest of the killer. Bender claimed Walter was stealing undue credit.

  Exasperated, Walter patiently reminded his friend that indeed he had first suggested that List would be wearing thick-rimmed glasses “like mine” to convey power and authority. But he happily acknowledged that Bender had accomplished the crowning work, the “coup de grace,” of finding an old pair of tortoiseshell glasses at an antique store that he put on the bust. They worked perfectly.

  “So I suggested the concept, and you made it reality, which some might suggest is the harder and more praiseworthy part. I know it’s hard to follow, but this is called teamwork, and in such instances, credit is shared.”

  Fleisher was beaming like a football coach watching his star players beating each other up at practice before a big game. The Case of the Missing Face was one of the most challenging cold cases ever brought before the Vidocq Society, he thought, and they needed this level of passion and commitment to solve it.

  It was clear as Bender returned to his South Street warehouse studio in Philadelphia and Walter to his Victorian mansion in the Pennsylvania mountains that the partners would be simultaneously working together and competing, as only they could.

  “I think Richard’s got a good profile going, and there’s nobody like Frank in giving name and face to the dead,” Fleisher said. “There’s nothing to go on but if anybody can do it it’s this group, my friends.” He grinned. “The question is: To whom will the bones talk?”

  Stripped to the waist in his studio, Bender animated the dead with clay using unknown powers that frightened those who saw him as arrogant, a Dr. Faust making deals with the devil. These people never knew the deep humility that Bender brought to his work. As he began to build up a skull with clay he abandoned all ego, left the moorings of space and time, gave himself utterly to “enter the flow of nature. You start with the eye, nose, and mouth and you keep them all flowing at the same time. Beautiful or ugly, our features were made to harmonize together.” Yet the Girl with the Missing Face was beyond humbling; with no nose, mouth, eyes, cheeks, or chin to go on, he called Hall up and repeated his fear: “This is impossible.” After parts of three days mulling the gaping hole in the center of the skull, he still didn’t know where to begin.

  Frustrated, he returned to his high-profile commission sculpture Unearthed. He was sculpting two slaves—a man and two women—from their exhumed eighteenth-century skulls to make a memorial for the African Burial Ground in New York City. Working with a slave skull, he noticed the small sphenoid bone behind the eye was nearly the same width as the nasal bones. The Girl with the Missing Face still had a sphenoid bone and since she was believed to be partly African American . . . had he stumbled upon a way to gauge her nasal aperture?

  He called a Howard University anthropologist working on the Unearthed project; the professor made a series of measurements on other skulls and said, “I think you’re onto something.” So Bender started with the nose. A broad coffee-colored face quickly appeared with soft brown eyes; the bones seemed to be telling him they did not belong to a typical coldhearted prostitute. She was a warm person with the weight of the world on her, Bender thought. It was a wild guess, he admitted, but it was somehow more than that. “I can feel it.”

  The unmarked police sedan came out of Manlius, New York, south on I-81, and down into the Appalachian ridge-and-valley country of Pennsylvania. It was a melancholy tumble of twisted forested roads and steep bluestone hills shadowing rocky streams. A hundred miles south, they reached the Biddle House at noon. Richard Walter answered the door himself.

  He ushered them into the parlor, seated them in the nineteenth-century chairs. As they laid the case file on the antique cherry table, he offered them a spot of coffee or tea. “Would anyone like cookies? I bake them
myself, chocolate chip and gingersnaps, with real butter in the old-fashioned way, and I don’t fool around with the chemistry. They’re quite wonderful recipes.” Lieutenant Kevin Barry and his two officers said they’d love some cookies.

  Over steaming coffee, Walter lit a Kool and said, “As a point of fact, there are only about five of us profilers in the world who know what we’re doing. The rest who claim to be profilers are fucking charlatans and frauds.”

  The cops grinned. It was true that profilers were getting a bad name in some quarters.

  “In truth, I prefer the term ‘crime assessment’ to ‘profiling,’ ” Walter continued. “Now because of all the TV forensic dramas and the amateur hour on the nightly news the public thinks profilers are wizards who come out of caves with their fantastic visions or some Borborygmic grumblings, but you can’t get there from here. The frauds read our stuff and give flip out-of-context assessments like, ‘He’s driving a blue car and hates women.’ It doesn’t work that way. Like anything else, it takes a lot of hard work. We’re talking probabilities and years of experience with similar cases, and analyzing them through the psychological continuum as well as the crime scene continuum.”

  Walter tipped his chin and blew cigarette smoke to the ceiling. “Gentlemen, let me explain the case to you in terms of a crime assessment.”

  Many factors, he said, including the remote burial of the young woman’s corpse, suggested the victim was a prostitute. Power-driven killers “love to kill prostitutes,” and when they do they dump the body as if disposing of trash. This type of killer typically makes a bold assault to the head, a straight-on attack, and here “we find that the victim’s skull has been smashed, the apparent cause of death.”

  The half of a zipper police found near the surface of the grave was a valuable clue. “With this type of killer,” Walter said, “we often find that the clothing of the victim had been forcibly torn off.” According to a police report, four teeth of the zipper were damaged. Detective Keith Hall led the painstaking effort to find and interview the zipper manufacturer and learned that “the damage appears to have been caused by the slider pulling out over the teeth when the zipper was forcibly pulled apart.”

  “Given these and other factors and probabilities, it’s highly likely that the killer is in his early to midtwenties, an ex-con, very muscular, lifts weights, macho, emotionally primitive, arrogant, drives a pickup truck, has girlie magazines lying around.”

  “As it happens,” he went on, “Updegrove fits the profile. That’s not to say he did it. But it was a guy like him, happy brandishing guns or other weapons—a guy with a criminal record.”

  They left with pages of notes, and cookies in freezer bags.

  • CHAPTER 51 •

  THE KILLER ANGELS

  Women around the wealthy, seventy-one-year-old Alabama businessman had a nasty habit of disappearing. So when he called the police to report his second wife missing, he was a suspect. Thirty years earlier, he had murdered his former mother-in-law—strangled and then stabbed the dead woman thirty-seven times with an ice pick—then returned home and told his first wife, “Our life is going to change. I killed your mother.” He had done only thirteen months in a reformatory, then received a partial pardon from Kentucky’s governor.

  “That’s one for Bartlett’s Book of Perverse Quotations,” Walter said. He was intrigued as the Alabama police presented Vidocq Society Case No. 112 at the August 2002 luncheon. He was afraid the suspect was a rich, brilliant, experienced psychopath too smart for the police. But he was more concerned that afternoon by his uncharacteristically glum partner. Bender had buried his eighty-nine-year-old mother, Sarah, in June. Bender had previously buried his father, Francis A. Bender, and taken the unusual step of participating in his father’s autopsy. Holding his father’s heart in his hands, Bender had tried to understand and make peace with him. Now his mother was gone, and Bender looked like he was holding her heart, too.

  That summer Bender felt as if the other dimension was shadowing his daily life. He and Walter flew to Chicago to make a joint presentation, “Criminal Case Studies,” to the Federal Bureau of Prisons national training program. After the lecture at the Chicago Hilton, two nuns who worked in prisons approached the artist and profiler with rosy praise, broad smiles on their faces.

  “You two do the work of angels,” one said.

  “Killer angels, perhaps,” Bender said.

  Walter was taken aback. He was quite sure that if a God had made the world He would not have created Theodore Bundy, but he held his tongue and mumbled a polite thank-you. Though it made him profoundly uneasy, he had to admit the seraphs of God seemed to be following him.

  At Christmas, he had received an unusual gift—a crystal obelisk depicting an angel—from a young Pennsylvania couple who had long suffered the agonies of grief, fury, and uncertainty over the unsolved murder of the wife’s brother. He had met them at a convention of the National Organization of Parents of Murdered Children, and his heart went out to them, as it did all the woebegone men and women at POMC who called him, there was no getting around it, “the avenging angel.”

  Yet it was not merely vengeance the profiler peddled to the stricken; it was wholeness and health. He had volunteered his services in the name of the Vidocq Society to speak to parents about the unspeakable, to wield sword or soft words, whatever tool necessary to vanquish their demons. “Their tormentors are all in the mind,” he said. “Either their own or the mind of their child’s killer. It’s a matter of bringing the darkness to light.” Just he, it seemed, could explain it all.

  Only at POMC conventions could one find a hotel conference room filled with fifty mothers whose children had been murdered. At the Cincinnati Westin they gathered to hear a talk on murderer subtypes, earnest faces turning to the tall, balding, bespectacled, thin man they had seen rushing through the hallways in his dark suit like a blade.

  He began his lecture by asking jauntily, “How many of you folks have not heard my little talk before?” Hands went up. “Liars!” he bellowed, and they roared with laughter. He approached a woman in the front row with a small trash can. “Madam,” he said, “if you are about to eat that butterscotch candy, please unwrap it and put it in your mouth now. I will not have plastic crinkling whilst I attempt to speak.” They gasped and laughed again. They loved him. Blasphemous, courtly, reeking of smoke and profanity, they loved him. After the speech, one by one, the mothers filed into a small smoking room of the hotel for private meetings with Walter in his cloud of Kools. In gentle, ten-minute confessionals, each gave a capsule description of their child’s murder, answering the detective’s questions—was the body face up or down? Was the knife at the scene?—and one by one they left with palpable serenity, careworn faces smoothed in some sense of peace. “He told me why Brian died,” an Asian woman said, leaving the confessional in Cincinnati. “For the first time I know. Now I can really grieve and heal.”

  Walter had the mind to discern and the heart to explain within the limits of human understanding why and how a heart of darkness took their child. He gave evil its place, however difficult, in the human family; saw shapes and forces at work that others did not. He was, one journalist said, the Stephen Hawking of the universe of the damned.

  Bob Meyer, a retired Tampa doctor, and his wife, Sherry, told Walter they were devastated to the point of emotional breakdown by the senseless, vile murders of their daughter Sherry-Ann Brannon, a lovely thirty-five-year-old blonde, and grandchildren: Shelby, seven, and Cassidy, four. The murders had occurred in Sherry-Ann’s large, new dream house with pool in Manatee County, Florida. There was no sign of forced entry. Meyer was convinced his son-in-law, Dewey Brannon, who had recently left the dream house and Sherry-Ann for another woman in the midst of a contentious divorce, was the killer.

  Police also considered Brannon the main suspect. The most intense six-week murder investigation in county history had revealed that it was Brannon, estranged and banned from the house on Father’s
Day, who had called 9-1-1 for help on the morning of September 16, 1999. He told the dispatcher he’d found the bodies of his wife and older daughter and thought it was a murder-suicide, but then he saw that Cassidy was badly hurt, too.

  He was cradling the four-year-old, dying from multiple stab wounds, in his arms.

  “Sir. It’s gonna be OK, all right,” the dispatcher tried to calm him.

  “It’s NOT gonna be OK,” he replied. “I’ve got two dead people here ’cause of me, all right. So just get somebody out here.” Three little words—the colloquial for “because of me”—had the whole county convinced Brannon was the killer, reporters wrote.

  But as the crime lab did its work, all the physical evidence at the scene pointed to Larry Parks, a forty-seven-year-old landscaper who had recently dug the family’s pool. Parks’s DNA was found in a piece of skin under Sherry-Ann’s fingernail. Parks confessed that he was “mighty high” on cocaine and crystal meth that morning when, after a failed night of hunting hogs to sell for cash for more drugs, he knocked on Sherry-Ann’s door with the ruse that his truck had broken down, and forced his way in intending, he said, to rob her. When she fought back, he stabbed her ten or more times with a kitchen knife, went upstairs and stabbed Shelby to death in her bedroom, then dragged Cassidy downstairs and stabbed her in front of her dying mother.

  Even though Parks pled guilty in exchange for three life terms—to avoid the death penalty—Bob Meyer said the case was destroying his family. He wanted Larry Parks dead. His wife had tried to enter the courtroom for Parks’s trial with a gun in her purse, an attempt at frontier justice all too common at POMC. His son-in-law, now exonerated, had plunged over the wooden railing to try to kill Parks. As deputies handcuffed him and took him away, his wife shouted toward the judge and Parks: “He killed our babies!”